Four Main Keys of Persona in Software Development
User research is an essential part of the user-centered design because the product serves users’ best interests. There are tons of research resources to put user experience research in its rightful place in a design process. One of them is a persona. The “Father of Visual Basic”, Alan Cooper, describes personas as examples of fictitious users who represent a subset of users.
What is Persona?
A persona is a fictitious person interested in the system. Persona will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals on a single page. It also helps you to recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, so it helps you to identify the user of your product. Persona guides your ideation processes and helps you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group. There is usually more than one type of user who will interact with your product, and persona helps to scope out the range of users.
What are the benefits of persona?
There are four benefits in making a persona:
- Get a similar perspective on the user. Persona helps designers to get out of themselves and realize that there are different people who have different needs and expectations. By creating personas, designers will be better infer what real users need.
- Understand who they make the product for. The more engages with the persona and sees the person in real, the designer will consider the user more in the design process and is always encouraged to create the best application that responds to the user’s needs.
- Make a decision. Persona helps designers to focus on strategies in product development. A deep understanding of the user makes it easy to determine for whom the product is made and what are the things that are needed and not needed by the user. This helps the product team prioritize incoming feature requests and what features they want to make.
- Communicate the result of user research. Most designers work in teams that have different fields of knowledge, with different expertise, experience, and perspectives. Although different, all teams must agree on every decision making. This is where the role of persona, a persona can summarize almost all important information about users that can be more easily understood by all team members including stakeholders.
How do you define a persona?
There are four key of information for a well-defined user persona:
- Header, includes a fictional name, image, and quote that summarize what matters most to the persona as it relates to your product.
- Demographic profile, based on facts and user research. Includes personal background, professional background, user environment, and psychographics.
- End goals, to determine what the persona wants or needs to fulfill.
- Scenario, how persona would interact with your product in a particular context to achieve his or her goals.
What are the perspectives on persona?
There are four perspective that your personas can take to ensure the persona add the most value to your design project and the fiction-based perspective:
- Goal-directed, to examine the process and workflow that your user would prefer to utilise in order to achieve their objectives in interacting with your product.
- Role-based, massively data-driven and incorporate data from both qualitative and quantitative sources.
- Engaging, how stories can engage and bring personas to life.
- Fictional, to make assumptions based upon past interactions with the user base, and products to deliver a picture of what, perhaps, typical users look like.
How to create a persona?
User research is a first step to creating a persona. By observing users, the team can understand their behavior and motivations, then create a design accordingly. There are four main parts to create a well-define persona:
- Data collection and analysis of data, perform high-quality user research of actual users in your target and form a general idea of the various users within the focus are
- Descriptions, decide the final number of personas and describe in a such way so as to express enough understanding and empathy to understand the users
- Scenario, describe a number of specific situations that could trigger use of the product and create a story about how the persona uses a future product
- Acceptance and involvement, confronting project participants with the hypothesis and revise the descriptions on a regular basis.
These are 7 things that must exist on a persona
- Name
- Picture
- Demography (sex, age, status, etc)
- Needs and goals
- Frustrations or pain points
- Behaviors
- Environment
How did we make persona on our project?
My project is an application for a lawyer to answer all the client’s questions, called Justika. Justika already has a website that has a quite similar function. Based on the website and research with our Product Owner, we got information about the user especially on their pain points using the website. We use their pain points to be our goal on our product.
We only had one persona, which is the Lawyer, but we made it for three kinds of lawyer that have possibility to use our product. We breakdown the user to three kinds of user, based on their speciality, age, and personality.
Here’s a Persona that my Software Engineering Project teams created:
- The eldest user, as a Criminal Expert Lawyer. Based on his age, we imply that he is not familiar with the technology. Other than that, we also categorized him as a traveler guy so he wants to be able to access the system anywhere and everywhere. Based on our research with our Product Owner, this kind of user is a novice user and the traveler one. So, their pain points are using the complicated application and couldn’t access the update when abroad.
2. The middle user, as a Civil Expert Lawyer. Based on her age, we imply that she is a career woman with a responsibility to take care of her child. Other than that, we also categorized her as a busy woman and always work structured. Based on our research with our Product Owner, this kind of user is a busy user and want to be able to access the system effectively. So, their pain points are using a too time-consuming application and get the question outside her field because it could waste her time.
3. The youngest user, as an Accounts Payable Expert Lawyer. Based on his age, we imply that he is an ambitious person who was very career-oriented. Other than that, we also categorized him as a newbie layer who still looking for more experience and expand his network. Based on our research with our Product Owner, this kind of user is a newbie lawyer and wants to use the application easily. So, their pain points are get question outside his field because of his limited experience and using an application which has a lot of step on one feature.
When creating a persona, focus on the context of the product. Only include details that serve a design purpose. Persona are helpful throughout the entire product development phase, from deciding on which features to have until evaluating the end product.
Conclusions
We as a development team must be able to identify the targets and needs of users who will use directly the product that we will or are developing. Developing persona might seem unnecessary and power consuming. But, it might has been one of the most important thing of a product development process. The creation of personas can be useful for the development team to be more focused when designing and implementing features to fit the user’s goals and needs. By creating a persona, you will start to understand the importance of the User-Centered Design process.
Happy designing :)
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